


Bloodtrap (You Are Here Remix)

by feverbeats



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-10
Updated: 2010-05-10
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:32:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feverbeats/pseuds/feverbeats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Family is a trap you can't escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bloodtrap (You Are Here Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/gifts).
  * Inspired by [toujours pur](https://archiveofourown.org/works/70856) by [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel). 



The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black has been sapped colorless with time. The corners of the rooms are faded like old photographs, unmoving and dead. You've heard Muggle photographs are like that, but you aren't sure you believe it. Sometimes the Muggle world sounds stranger than this one, even though this one is killing you as slowly as it can manage.

You are a Malfoy, the last of a withering, failing line that's finally trailed off like the end of a horrible sentence, leaving you here in this mess, in this house. And now you're here, in the house of your mother's kin, trying to remember to breathe on a regular basis.

You walk to a bookshelf and thumb idly through a large, dusty book bound in black—black, always black. You do all of this slowly, deliberately, hoping you can hide your desperation well enough that the house won't leap on you and rip your throat out. The book is an index of the worst things that can happen to a person: bleeding spells, withering spells, something called lunglock. You wonder which one you've got. But you stay.

You wonder how your mother ever escaped out from under this rotting structure, until you remember that she escaped by marrying your father, which wasn't really an escape at all. Then again. Your house was never full of shadows that moved in ways shadows should not move. Your house was all light and flame and things you thought Slytherins were supposed to scorn, but you couldn't, you never could.

You wonder if this house drives people mad, or if mad people come here to die. Everything here is dust and rot, and you can feel yourself following suit. It's always been easy for you to fall into habit, mimicking the people around you until it becomes disgustingly easy to do what they are doing. If what they are doing is rotting in their portrait frames, you're sure it's only a matter of time for you.

You avoid the portrait of your great-aunt Walburga that hangs behind closed curtains. One time you accidentally open the curtains, just curious. She bursts out, the only thing you've seen move in front of your eyes so far, and starts screaming at you about being from a bloodline of freaks and monsters. You assume she's talking about her father. When you shut the curtain and finally stop shaking, you decide she isn't really one to talk.

That is in your first week here. Welcome to 12 Grimmauld Place, Draco Malfoy.

Family is a trap you can't escape. You are born into it already held fast, and the only way out is to thrash and flail until you're ripped bloody. At least blood would be a change from this fucking house with its misleading blacks and whites, you think.

Aunt Bella was always your favorite aunt, after you see your grandmother's portrait, the entire bloodline makes you feel sick. You wish you could go back to just being a Malfoy, but it's too late for that. It's been too late since you were born, and now you're just stuck in this slow, sludgy horror of a home that was never meant to be yours.

You think that's what this place is doing: turning you into a Black. It's drawing out the Malfoy strain in your blood and filtering it away, drying and fading it until you're painted in different shades.

Panic rises in your throat whenever you walk through the kitchen. The dusty cupboards leer at you, with their chipped china cups that probably cost more than a year of auror training. You've had nightmares about just those cups.

You try sleeping on the couch in the parlor for a while, because you can't stand the idea of taking any of the bedrooms with their weighty history. Something in the curtains rustles all night, though, and you eventually break and take your cousin Regulus's room. It's the only place you feel even remotely safe, and then it's only in five-minute increments. It's like Regulus's ghost is some sort of shaky shield against the sharp bones of the house that keep trying to poke through the skin from the outside. In here, the slumped piles of antiques can't haunt you. In here, everything is in its place and nothing is trying to worm its way into your head.

You sleep fitfully when you do, swaddled in your dead cousin's black, black sheets, coughing dust when you wake. One of these days, you think maybe you won't wake, and that will show them all. (There is no one left to show.)

You've only been into the other son's bedroom once, the one with the yellowed, peeling posters on the walls. It felt like nothing, and that was worse than the towering feeling of decay everywhere else. You'd rather be buried than gutted. It's important to pick your poison.

A horror that can't wedge itself into your heart is trying. You are so tired and so much of a coward that you sometimes feel as though you don't have an ounce of awe left to spare for this monstrous house that keeps trying to impress you like you're some fucking Mudblood.

You stop going out at all. You don't remember the last time you ate. This should scare you, but it doesn't. This place has stripped some parts of you clean already, sucking on the bone and waiting for you to give up whatever's left. You wonder how long you can possible survive this and if you do survive, what'll be left of you. If you were to emerge now, a black and white ghost, would people stare? Would they say, _There he goes, another Black_?

The worst part is, you know this house. Its in your veins like a blood disease, like a memory of something you never experienced. Maybe memories are handed down as well. You cough dust and try to keep the little flames of hatred alive in your chest. If you can just hate this house enough, it won't be able to collapse around you and crush you to death.


End file.
